Stephen King, Heather O’Neill and Liesl Schillinger (elevation of object)

We talk a lot in class about elevating objects and exploding moments. Here we’re going to look at how several writers elevate objects to tell their stories. The elevation of objects is a great way to get your reader to pay attention to what you’re saying, without pounding her/him over the head with your point. You are saying, Pay attention here. I am about to tell you a story about this not very significant object and why it is important to me, and eventually, you will care deeply about it too because of how I describe it and bring it to life. And the object carries the story.

It is a great exercise to take one object that means something to you, as these writers have done here, and write a detailed, dramatic back story for it. King does it with a wedding ring, Strayed does it with a pair of yoga pants (and ultimately the crotch of it), Hood does it with tomato pie, O’Neill does it with a garbage can she received from her father and Schillinger does it with her mother’s silver service.

Stephen King’s The Ring, Tin House, Spring 2014: I love Stephen King. His memoir, On Writing, is one of the best books I’ve read on how to become a writer (with a great, funny and poignant history of how he became a writer). Whenever I come across a piece of his non-fiction, I know it’s going to be funny, self-aware, honest, and memorable. His essay, The Ring, from the Spring 2014 issue of Tin House, did not disappoint.

Let’s look at what makes this essay work. For one thing, he tells us the story of his wedding ring and why it is important to him. He elevates the object and describes what it is ultimately a love story, though we don’t know that from the outset. This piece is only about eight or nine paragraphs long. He brings us into the story right away by making it intimate and confessional: He tells us he rolled over in bed and asked the woman lying next to him if she wants to marry him. He’s kind of sexy and vulnerable here, a great combination. It never hurts to bring the reader into the bedroom with you. The dialogue begins right away. We all love to read dialogue; it breaks the prose up, and it’s often livelier and funnier than the exposition.

Then King is very clever: he writes that his future wife does not think that getting married is a good idea but she’ll do it anyway. So he’s setting his narrator up for a challenge and intrigues the reader: Will this marriage work out? Or are we about to watch the beginning of a train wreck? It’s always a good idea to engage your reader right away. He knits us further to the story by admitting he has no money and a drinking problem. Here are two big challenges to overcome and he’s only two paragraphs in.  He makes us wonder if getting married is actually a very stupid idea. This is great writing. It’s always a good idea to get your reader to think that your protagonist might be getting him/herself in trouble.

Next, he piles up the detail: He takes us to a specific jewelry store. He tells the salesclerk he wants to see the cheapest wedding rings he has. So he’s cheap and poor: We can all relate to that. He specifically describes how his wallet is attached to his pants with a biker’s chain (so specific we can see it), then writes dialogue between him and his future wife: “I bet they green our fingers.” Here is some nice color, literally: Green. It’s always a good idea to weave color into your work. Your reader remembers colors and can see them. King’s future wife is skeptical about their relationship working out; again, the tension is mounting and we think the odds are stacked against this couple. We want to see what will happen. If this marriage is going to explode, we are going to get a ringside seat.

In the next paragraph, he brings us to the wedding, with great details about what he’s wearing (borrowed, big suit) and what his wife is wearing (blue pants suit, worn for the second time.) These characters are resourceful, practical and have no money. Will they survive? We read on to find out. He describes his wife as looking “gorgeous and scared to death.” We all want to read about a beautiful woman, and a scared, beautiful woman is even more intriguing. What will happen to her? Is King putting her in jeopardy? By this point, both key characters are wearing their rings but the fate of their relationships is uncertain.

In the next paragraph, King’s wife Tabitha loses her wedding ring. The ring slips down the drain. Will the marriage also slip down the drain? We read on to find out. King tries to save the old ring but fails and then replaces it. Then he writes this brilliant, plain-spoken line: “It was worth less than eight dollars, it was worth everything.”

In the last paragraph, King describes his love for his wife. We all want to read about relationships: How they work, how they fail. He goes back and describes his old apartment, with vivid, you-are-there details: “The ring reminds me of where we were back then: the tiny three-room apartment with the balky stove and the noisy refrigerator, the creaking floorboards, the winter drafts, the traffic going by at night, the post over the sink reading HONEY, WE’RE ALL WASHED UP.” We can see that apartment, the stove, and the fridge, hear the traffic, feel the cold. We all remember being young and probably poor. Our senses are activated and heightened, our memories are stimulated, and we begin to feel nostalgic with him.

 In the last sentence, he returns to the ring: He still has it and it still hasn’t greened his finger. This little ring has told the whole story of his marriage and King says as much: “The ring is a way of holding on to perspective, of staying in touch with what we had (next to nothing) and what we were (pretty damn good). It’s a way of remembering that what a thing costs isn’t necessarily what a thing is worth.” He used the ring to tell a story.

Heather O’Neill, The Secret Life of Our Trash Can (from the Lives column of the 3/16/14 NY Times magazine): This piece is only 12 paragraphs long and yet O’Neill, a novelist, does a great job of using an object (a 15-year old garbage can her father gave her) to tell the story of her relationship with her father and her role as a single mother to her daughter. The way she describes it, the garbage can becomes a person. O’Neill writes this dialogue between her daughter and herself, after leaving the garbage can out in a yard full of debris:

“Aw,” she says. “He’s all abandoned.”

“He’s probably wondering what he did wrong,” I said.

“I wonder if he’s wondering why we just walked by him.”

This is very clever: mother and daughter have turned this abandoned garbage can into a boy or a man. The garbage can has feelings. The garbage can is in jeopardy. We now start to feel for and worry about the garbage can and “his” feelings. O’Neill, through her daughter, takes this one step further. She writes. “Then my daughter turned to me with her big blue cartoon eyes and said, ‘I’m feeling really bad for the garbage can right now.” Okay, we get it: The garbage can is a sentient being.

Then O’Neill gives us the history of the garbage can: It came from her father, a janitor, who gave her other things as well: Eight plungers and “a piece of industrial strength steel wool the size of a storm cloud.” This is beautiful, vivid writing. We not only see the steel wool, we feel the father’s love for his daughter. Then O’Neill describes the circumstances that led her father to give her the garbage can: She was living in an old apartment in a neighborhood she didn’t like. She was a young single mom, presumably poor and vulnerable, in difficult circumstances. She could hear other people’s business, their radios going, the sounds of them fighting and laughing. We hear these sounds along with her. The odds are stacked against her. We worry for her too. Then, she saves money and moves. She brings the garbage can with her. The garbage can begins its journey (as every good protagonist does in a story) as mother and daughter begin their “new life.” O’Neill now turns her new neighborhood into a character: “We live near a fire station, and the fire trucks pass all day. A funeral home is nearby and there are processions of cars with flowers on top of them moving slowly down the street. The Portuguese church has a parade with a statue of the Virgin Mary hoisted into the back of the pickup truck. There’s a lot to see.” This is lush, vivid, clever writing: We have the specter of death (the funeral home and procession.) We have the fear of fire. We have religion (the Portuguese church and the Virgin Mary.) We have resourceful people, celebrating and mourning together, and we have parades. The neighborhood sounds like an interesting, community-oriented place to live or visit. And we have visited there for a little while.

O’Neill circles back to the garbage can. A fat white cat knocks its lid off. The garbage men leave it lying in front of a bakery, like a crime victim. Then O’Neill admits there are other objects she’s become attached to that she and her daughter have allowed to become real or take on human emotions: The “real” galaxy of plastic stars, a favorite T-shirt that becomes offended, a stuffed owl that offers comfort. O’Neill explains how her mind (and her writing) operate: “When you have a child, you fictionalize the world so that is is a warm place, filled with compassionate doorknobs and caring sofas and stars in the sky that listen to your wishes.” You may or not do this when you have a child, but it’s a great thing to do when you are a writer. Finally, she concludes the piece by further investing the garbage can with human emotion in a story she tells about her daughter: “My daughter is a teenager now and will soon be moving away from me. But when she came home that night, the garbage can was back I front of our apartment. Its crack was covered up with silver and black duct tape. It looked as if it had been attacked by fierce pirates and come home to her one last time to tell the marvelous tale.”

This magical thinking and it works. By the end of this piece, we believe the garbage can might finally be ready to talk. Meanwhile, we feel the mother’s yearning for the sweet days of her daughter’s childhood and all the props she used to get through it.

Liesl Schillinger, A Formal Setting (from the Lives column of the 4/18/14 NYT magazine): In this piece, Schillinger, a writer and translator, describes silverware that her mother gave her. Her vacuum just happened to bump up against it. This piece is only seven or eight paragraphs long, but in it, we learn about her role in the family (dutiful daughter) and how she feels about her aging parents (they are still actively feeding and parenting their children.) The story is also about the possibility of change: Will Schillinger rise to the occasion and start to throw fancy dinner parties, as her mother and grandmother expected her to? Schillinger says she is a “serial dater and workaholic” at the beginning of the essay, so she leads us to believe that she is not someone who is going to use her silver and host dinner parties anytime soon. However, this is what she was trained to be, so she raises the question: Will she do it?

This is the story of a woman trying to find her place in the world, and she tells this story by describing silverware. One set came from her grandmother and is French Scroll sterling. There is also a back up set of silver plate, Moselle, “sprigged with dainty clusters of grapes.” We can see this. There is a nice note from Granny, that she quotes verbatim---it’s a great idea to quote old letters. Think of these as props that will serve your story.

In the fourth paragraph, Schillinger gives us “process.” Frank Conroy used to say that “process is always interesting.” Tell your reader how to do something. Educate your reader. Readers always want to learn something new. Schillinger describes in detail how she learned to set a formal table when she was six. She writes about her mother: “While she was polishing the candlesticks, I filled the seven other settings, laying down from left to right an ironed napkin, dinner fork, salad fork, china plate, knife and spoons; then putting a wineglass at top right, water glass below that, bread plate above the forks, coffee cup and saucer besides the spoons.” We can see the table, see Schillinger dutifully setting the table according to her mother’s instructions. So she learned from a very young age how to set a proper table. Will she do it as an adult?

By this point, you may or may not care about Schillinger’s decision. But then she brings out the big guns: In the final paragraph, she tells us her parents are aging (72 and 71). The prospect of death is here, that always scares the reader, makes him/her sit up and pay attention. If Schillinger’s parents pass away, will she be the one to take out the lace tablecloth, Grand Baroque Silver and Fitzgerald china? She leads us to believe that with death in the air, she will. This is a clever way to end the story: Sort of, kind of, kill off two characters so the main character can change. Ultimately, this piece is not that sad or moving because the change is only contemplated and the characters haven’t died. But it’s an interesting use of elevating an object to tell a story.